A lectern is a special interactive and decorative block that can be found as a rare spawn in the world of Minecraft.
Its main usage is holding books so that players can access them without dropping them between one another, but it also servers as a villager job site.
The rarity of these items means that learning how to build one is useful, especially if you plan on making a village of your very own, with villagers of different professions. In this article we will show you how to make a lectern in Minecraft, and how to use it too.
Minecraft Lectern Recipe
- 4 wooden slabs (any wood)
- 1 bookshelf
The recipe for a lectern is fairly simple and easy to make. The hardest ingredient to get a hold of might be the bookshelf as it requires quite a few books to be made in the first place.
But once you have all of these you just have to arrange them like you see in the image below to make one.
You can use any and all types of wooden slabs for the lectern as long as they have come from the Overworld.
This means crimson and warped wood are the only ones that can’t be used.
Using a Lectern
Like we have mentioned before a lectern has two main uses.
The first use is one for players. Once placed in the world you can interact with a lectern while holding a book and quill or signed finished book.
This will lay the book out with its covers open and allow multiple people to read the book at the same time.
This cannot be a regular book or an enchanted book. It must specifically be a book and quill, which allows you to write inside of it.
The other use of a lectern that you may be more likely to use in survival gameplay is giving villagers a job. It’s possible to spawn in villagers and put them to work in a variety of different ways.
Many utility blocks in Minecraft, when placed near or around unemployed villagers in a village, will grant the villager a job. You can tell a villager has a particular job based on the clothes they are wearing.
These employed villagers will perform various things around a village and, most importantly, offer you trades.
A lectern will grant an unemployed villager the librarian profession.
This type of villager will allow you to trade emeralds for the following items:
- Enchanted books
- Compasses
- Clocks
- Name Tags
- Glass
- Ink sacs
- Books and quills
- Lanterns
For those who are looking to get into enchanting, having a librarian villager on hand may be very useful if you have the right amount of emeralds to trade.
What to do Next
If a lectern is not what you wish to use your books on, then consider getting into enchanting.
Books, other than being used to write in, can also be used for enchanting. Books can be used both to craft an enchanting table as well as store a lot of useful enchantments for later usage.
With enchanted books you can easily get your hands on some of the best armor enchantments that exist in the game.
